On NPR.org there's a recent article talking about their Ingest system they've built that allows partner stations to pull and distribute their content.

The Ingest System currently accepts stories in two XML data formats. We accept a limited subset of NPRML - our own home-grown way of expressing story content in XML. We also accept RSS with MediaRSS and NPRML extensions for audio and images and other resources. [...] While implementing the Ingest System, we faced an interesting technical challenge. Our APIs, including the components we use to authenticate API access, are written in PHP, while our content management system (CMS) is written in Java.

The article describes how their API system works, pulling together XML content, serialized JSON messaging and an authentication component to push and pull data to and from their Java-based CMS - complete with a diagram laying out the whole process.